Good morning. It is great to be back in the ‘burgh rain and all. For some of you who don’t know, I was away for a few weeks for a sabbatical. It was a study time, and I was able to feel somewhat productive. I also had a time of rest. The better news is Debbie and I got to see our lovely granddaughter, Daniella. Isn’t she cute? It is good to be back. I will open with a question. How many of you have had the chance to see the new movie that is out called Jurassic World? A few of you. I was able to see it this past week. It is a pretty good movie and pretty much what you would expect. It has a lot of great special effects, but the plot is a little bit thin. I don’t think I am giving way too much of it. It takes place 22 years after the fiasco that happened at Jurassic Park. The good news is that the park ended up turning into a dinosaur theme park that was really doing well. The bad news is that, over time, people got bored with these dinosaurs and the sales started going down. So the engineers had to figure out how to create a new hybrid-type attraction, aka a dinosaur, that would bigger and better than the other ones. Unfortunately, as you might suspect, the dinosaur ended up eating a lot of people. As I thought about it, I thought this is a real commentary on our culture. When you think about it, we get bored very easily. Just like the people got bored of the standard dinosaurs out there, we get bored of life. So often we are constantly seeking something that would give us some new sense of satisfaction, some new sense of meaning only to come up short. Or, in the case of the dinosaurs, to possibly get eaten by the very thing that we think that we desire. I think that is the message really almost of the movie but also the message of the book that we are going to begin to look at, the book of Ecclesiastes.
First of all, the question is how many of you have ever read the book of Ecclesiastes? A few of you. For those of you who are not familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes, it is an Old Testament book that falls under the category of wisdom literature just like the book of Proverbs or Job. Wisdom literature refers to a number of things but at a minimum what it does is teach that the best choices in life, the good choices in life are really connected to Godly choices in life. That is why the book of Proverbs opens up by saying “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.” The key thing is the fear of the Lord. It makes sense that if you are going to make Godly choices, you should have a reverent fear of God and attempt to keep his commandments. This word wisdom is not really related to IQ or that sort of thing. Wisdom speaks of an orientation towards God and away from the world. When we think about this book Ecclesiastes, it is also considered wisdom literature not only because the author was very wise but really the wise advice that he gives us. The advice that basically says you should live a life underneath God, a life of submission to God, as opposed to simply life on this earth or life under the sun. If you are familiar with the book, you know that the author does a very good job of convincing us of the importance of that. So much so that he kind of gets very redundant. It is very perplexing. Sometimes it is hard to follow what is going on in Ecclesiastes because he seems to meander a lot. One thing you notice if you have read it, it is a very negative book. It comes across very negative. So negative that some people ask why would God want to even include the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible because isn’t the Bible supposed to be about hope and God’s love and God’s love expressed through Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins and that sort of thing. Ecclesiastes isn’t anything like that. It is kind of a hopeless sounding book. You can glean that from the first few lines where he says “The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem: ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!’ What does man gain from all the labor at which he toils under the sun?” You have to admit when you read that you say these have to be some of the most negative words in the entire Bible. If you have read through Ecclesiastes you know that things don’t get much better. The writer goes on and rants and raves about how all the things that he pursued turned out to be pretty much meaningless.
The first question you might want to ask is who is this guy referred to as the teacher and why is he so negative? A little bit of background on this word teacher. We translate the Hebrew word teacher but really a better translation is one who assembles or one who gathers. I think when Austin preached a few weeks ago, I think he talked about the word ecclesia which basically means to assemble. It is a word we associate with church. The word Ecclesiastes basically just means an assembling of people. That is why we translate it teacher or some actually translate it the preacher. I think Eugene Peterson in the book The Message translates it questor because of someone who is on a quest. Somebody else suggested a better name, searcher. Someone who had the opportunity to search all avenues of life. To learn about all the different philosophies of life and then gather people together to basically tell his findings. In this case, his findings are that everything is meaningless. Although the name is not mentioned in the book, most people suspect that the book was written by none other than King Solomon. The clue is in the very first line where it says “The word of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.” It is not simply because it is mentioned like this that the scholars assume it is Solomon. When we think about it, Solomon was the one that was most qualified to write such a book. He really was.
In case you don’t know much about King Solomon, I will give you a little bit of background. You may recall that we talked about King Solomon in the series called The Story. King Solomon was a king of Israel and had a lot of favor in the eyes of God. If you recall, when he first was going to become king, he was a very young man and possibly even a child. God asked Solomon what is it that you need that would help you do your job well. Instead of asking for money or possessions or soldiers or weapons or anything like that, he said I just want some wisdom. I want the wisdom so I can know that I can carry out my task as king very well. We know that God granted him a wise and discerning heart. So much so that he was spoken of as someone who there was no one else wiser than in all of history. Because Solomon didn’t ask for wealth and that sort of stuff, for some reason God dumped it on him anyway. God gave Solomon a bunch of wealth and he gave Solomon a very long life. We read in 1 Kings that it says “King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all other things of the earth. The whole world sought an audience of Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put into his heart.” So Solomon was known as a very wise leader. As we know, similar to the other kings in the Old Testament, although Solomon started out strong, he didn’t end his life strong. He had a lot of wealth and had a lot of time on his hands and he also had a thing for women. He loved foreign woman, so he basically accumulated women as somebody would collect coins. We read in 1 Kings that it says “He had 700 wives of royal birth, 300 concubines, and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God as the heart of David, his father, had been.” So, obviously, God was disappointed in Solomon. So much so that you may recall that God ended up dividing Solomon’s kingdom in two between the north and the south and it was never again to be a united kingdom.
So thinking again about the opening of Ecclesiastes, the teacher is believed to be King Solomon because he had the time, money, and power to pretty much pursue any avenue of life where he thought that he might be able to find some pleasure or satisfaction only to always come up short. I suspect some of you might have gone to the Rolling Stones concert last night. Did he sing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’? Solomon was singing it 3,000 years earlier. He was the one man in history who had the opportunity to pursue everything for satisfaction, again always coming up short. He had a long life and he might have written Proverbs at the beginning of his life and then Song of Songs which he wrote probably midlife and then they believe that he wrote Ecclesiastes towards the end of his life as a very aged and very old man that was really regretting how he squandered his life on wine, women, songs, possessions, and all that kind of stuff. Ecclesiastes is definitely a negative-sounding book, but that is because Solomon’s life took a very negative spin at the end of his life. The question that I ask and some of you ask is what do you do with a book like this? This is a strange book. You could do like some people do or even some pastors do and just say let’s skip over this one. We don’t need to look at this one. We don’t need to look at the difficult passages. That is a temptation. It is a temptation for me. Or we could take the approach, if we really believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, and say let’s try to figure out why God chose to include such a strange book into the 66 books of the Bible. And really ask ourselves what relevance would that type of book have for today? As I did a little bit of study and read different commentaries what came to me is that most people think Ecclesiastes is one of the most relevant books in the entire Bible. It speaks to a culture that pretty much has turned its collective back on God. That is what the book does. You may or may not agree, but there are a lot of people and pastors and leaders and politicians and even President Obama who would suggest that we are in what is called a post-Christian America. Which basically means, among other things, we can no longer assume that most of the people we meet have some affiliation with Christianity. It is just not true anymore. There was a recent poll by the Gallup agency that basically found out that “The percentage of Americans who identify with some form of a Christian religion has been dropping in recent decades and now stands at 77%. In 1948, the percentage of Christians was 91%.” Another poll found that 15% of Americans now claim no religious affiliation at all, nearly double the percentage in 1990. What it says is that we can no longer assume that people believe in God, which means we can longer assume that they believe in things like the virgin birth and that God created the heavens and the earth. They no longer believe in things like sin. They no longer believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In fact, those don’t mean anything to a good percentage of the world because they were never exposed to it. They were never brought up into it. Not only has culture turned its back on God, it has really rejected anybody’s claim that there is any sort of absolute truth out there. They have rejected that. There is really no truth. Truth is only defined by the person and it becomes a relative thing to the person. It is often tied to happiness. The common message that we hear throughout culture is your truth is your truth, my truth is my truth, and all that matters is that we are happy. Isn’t that what we hear? All that matters is that we are happy. Everybody’s truth is relative. The problem is that if the culture does not believe in God and does not believe in any sort of absolute truth or any sort of absolute meaning out there, then the culture is going to seek meaning from all sorts of sources on this planet. Seek it out through drugs or alcohol or pornography or entertainment or sports and all these sorts of things out there. Again only to come up short. Finding that these things have no lasting sense of meaning. As Christians, we know that trying to find meaning apart from God is really a fruitless endeavor. We know that life has absolutely no meaning apart from God. That is the message of Christianity and really that is the message of the book of Ecclesiastes. There is no meaning apart from God. When the teacher makes the statement “’Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’ What does man gain from all of his labor at which he toils under the sun?” it is not just words coming from a man who is sour on life or upset because he wasn’t able to achieve what he wanted to achieve. No. What you are hearing is a man who had first-hand experience with pursuing just about every opportunity in life that could offer any sort of satisfaction only to come up short. Only to come to the conclusion that it is all meaningless. As he will say later in the book “a chasing after the wind”.
As a side note, the word meaningless is actually translated in some Bibles as vanity and Eugene Peterson in the book The Message translates it as smoke. So he would translate this verse to say “Smoke! Nothing but smoke. That is what the questor says. There is nothing to anything. It is all smoke.” I think that is an interesting way to say it. But really the idea of meaninglessness and vanity and smoke all fit because what we are talking about here is emptiness or something that is very transitory and doesn’t stick around like smoke or a vapor or a bubble that you blow and it bursts and it’s gone. That is really what the main emphasis is here. In fact, the word meaningless we will see is mentioned all the way through the book of Ecclesiastes. I think it is like 38 times including the last chapter, chapter 12, where it basically repeats everything is meaningless. So the word meaningless basically becomes a bookend around the whole book that emphasizes the theme of meaninglessness.
Then he goes on to emphasize his point by saying in verse 3 “What does man gain from all of his labor at which he toils under the sun?” Again, the word gain in some places is translated profit. And you know profit is what is left over after you pay the bills or whatever it is. Here what he is saying is after you have used every bit of energy to pursue some sort of enjoyment in life, whether through work, pleasures, hedonistic-type activities, whatever, after you have pursued all these things, what is left? What is left that is going to continue to sustain your need for satisfaction? The implied answer here is absolutely nothing. Nothing. Nothing will be sustained after that. In fact, he goes on to summarize it later that basically “Now it has all been heard; Here is the conclusion on the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of every man.” I am giving away the ending. As a side note, this is kind of interesting because this is how Proverbs began, but this is how Ecclesiastes ends. After I have pursued everything all through life and found that it came up empty, the conclusion is fear God and keep his commandments. In other words, live a life that is bent towards reverence and obedience to God. So the book of Ecclesiastes is a very, very relevant book for today because it speaks to the spirit of the age. The spirit that would say you can find your purpose in life. You don’t need God. Go for the gusto. Go for the experience. Do everything you can and go for it. We know that they just come up short.
Some of you still might say that is well and good, but we are all Christians here and we know this stuff so why do we have to open this book and read this book because it is kind of depressing? The reality is that, if statistics are right, about 30% of you people are not Christians. I can’t assume everybody in this room is a Christian. That is between you and God. Even if I did assume that you were all Christians, the reality is that most of you spend one hour a week in church and what are you doing with the other 167 hours? You are spending it in culture and you are constantly being formed and shaped by the culture and by the spirit of the world. That is what is going on. If you are being shaped by the spirit of the world, you don’t even know it. The world is enticing you and pulling you down paths that you don’t even know are leading to dead ends and have the possibility of destroying your life. So the book of Ecclesiastes is just not a book that is written to the world. It is written as a warning to Christians. A warning to not seek out anything ever apart from God. What I am hoping to do this series is not just go through the book of Ecclesiastes. In fact, I can’t go through the entire book, but when I go through the book, I don’t want you to leave feeling depressed and down and hopeless because it is easy when you read that book you could get that way. Basically, what I am trying to do (and frankly I am not even sure how well I can do it because I haven’t thought past this sermon yet much) is I want to contrast life Under the Sun, which is the life he is talking about that you live right now on this earth for so many number of years, with life Under the Son, Jesus Christ. I think I can do that. In fact, some of you are capable of doing it because some of you are wiser than King Solomon. You know why? Because with all the knowledge, with all the things King Solomon had at his disposal, he didn’t have the full revelation of the goodness and grace of God through Jesus Christ that we have today. He only had half the picture. That is why he looked at life as half-empty. We have been given the full knowledge of the goodness and grace of God through Jesus Christ. That means we don’t have to go through life looking at it half-empty and negative. We can actually embrace not only the life to come but this life because we can rely on the promise of Jesus Christ when he said “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.” He wasn’t talking about the afterlife. That is part of it. He was saying I have come so that they may have life right now and have it to the fullest extent that is available through Christ.
I am keeping this sermon short because it is meant to be an introduction. But what I would ask you to maybe think about doing, if you are someone who likes to read your Bible, maybe this next week read through the book of Ecclesiastes. It is 12 chapters. If you read it or listen to it, it is no more than a half hour. You might want to listen to it a few times just to kind of get the sense of the thought pattern of King Solomon and where he is going to be going and where I might be going in the next few weeks and really how you can contrast this negative life of living under the sun with the full life that is living under Jesus Christ. As you sit down and read, reflect on it. Are you like Solomon and using all your time, talent, treasures, and power to pursue things in life that you think are going to provide satisfaction or happiness? Or are you living a life under the Son of God, Jesus Christ, that you know will provide hope, a sense of meaning, provide a sense of satisfaction, again not only in the future life but the life we live right now under the Son? Again, Jesus said “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.” Let us pray.
